The Path to the Spider’s Nests, by Italo Calvino.
The path to the spiders’ nests, by Italo Calvino ; translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Martin McLaughlin. Originally published 1947
This was Calvino’s first novel, by his account written hurriedly in the final months of 1946—though the available translation incorporates revisions the author made years after the book’s initial publication, as well as including Calvino’s apologetic and nostalgic preface, written in 1964, in which he laments the short lived era of postwar Italian literature where it seemed possible to recreate the novel from scratch. Calvino also muses (absurdly in his case, given the inventiveness of his later work) on the idea that an author’s first book is his only truly original one and that all subsequent books are imitations of himself and others. Calvino at one time had kept the book out of print, feeling that it was unrepresentative of his work.
It certainly shares more with the Italian neo-realist novels published alongside it than with the playful and abstract style of Invisible Cities or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but it does share some of the grace and nimbleness of Calvino’s best writing, employing the present tense to springheel jack the prose.
The novel focuses on the Italian partisan resistance to Fascist and Nazi rule during World War II, with a boy named Pin—whose sister is a prostitute: The Dark Lady of the Alley—drawn into the fight not by idealism or revenge, but simply out of the wish to belong. He likes to joke with the armchair partisans in the tavern, but is told that he will be shunned if he does not steal the pistol of a German soldier sleeping with his sister. The theft propels Pin into the partisan movement when he is arrested and then escapes from jail with a notorious teenaged fighter known as Red Wolf. Pin sees how quickly identities are created and shed in the chaos of guerilla war—some of the partisan fighter were once Fascists and others will later leave the resistance to join the enemy.
Pin joins up with a unit reminiscent of the Dirty Dozen, made up of thieves and rascals. The experience is unromantic: the leader spends most of each day scratching at the lice on his skin and the men argue about communism and women. This part of the book is the least effective as the focus moves off of Pin, who loves getting off a good insult more than dialectical debate, and onto the grown-up screw-ups of the unit.
The novel visits and revisits the place of spiders’ nests, a nearly mythical area where Pin hides the German’s gun. Pin’s childlike love for this spot and his dismay at its destruction, remind me most of Calvino’s later, more fanciful fictions, which came after the war had been dealt with directly and it was as exciting to stare into small crevices as at distant explosions.